Monday, July 4, 2016

Dear Ms. Mantel: But of Course the Church Isn’t Respectable!

A
rather nice piece by George Weigel (HT/the husband) has reminded me why,
despite my interest in all things Tudor English, we stopped watching Wolfe Hall after one episode (even
though it’s free with Amazon Prime): my, that historical flimmery-flummery!(Though to be fair, half of our reason for
quitting was that it was terribly depressing.Somehow even The Man in the High
Castle, despite its rather more dystopian setting, managed to be less so.)

Weigel’s piece also sent me off to
reading his links, including the
rather sad one where Wolfe Hall’s author, Hilary Mantel, declares that “nowadays
the Catholic Church is not an institution for respectable people.”(She also calls herself “one of nature’s
Protestants,” whatever that may mean.)Mantel’s more specific criticisms of the Church are more on point, and
certainly merit reply—which I will eschew, since they have been amply addressed
elsewhere.(For starters, on the clerical
scandals, see
Fr. Z and BishopBarron.)But the respectability point made me laugh
because, however archetypically British such a lament may be, most Catholics
(British and otherwise) are well aware that from the days of the Roman Empire
on up into the present Catholics have never been respectable.It is not one of our aspirations.

Chesterton, to be sure, asserted
that Catholicism “is the only type of Christianity that really contains every
type of man; even the respectable man” (“Why I Am a Catholic”); but as that “even”
suggests, respectable was hardly one
of Chesterton’s favored terms—he tends to use it with a note of irony, e.g.: “How
quickly revolutions grow old; and, worse still, respectable” (The Listener,
3-6-35); “Christ prophesied the whole of Gothic architecture in that hour when
nervous and respectable people (such people as now object to barrel organs)
objected to the shouting of the gutter-snipes of Jerusalem” (Orthodoxy, 7).

And of course, there is this:

…
the orthodox Church was never respectable. It would have been easier to have
accepted the earthly power of the Arians. It would have been easy, in the
Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of
predestination. It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is
always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one’s
own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. To have
fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion
after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom—that
would indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall; there are an
infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have
fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would
indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one
whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering
through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth
reeling but erect.(Orthodoxy, 6, chapter conclusion.)

Even that would-be paragon of
English country-gentlemanliness, Evelyn Waugh, knew better than to say that the
church of his choice was respectable.

“… I wish I liked Catholics more.”

“They seem just like other people.”

“My dear Charles, that’s exactly what they are not—particularly in this country, where they’re so few.It’s
not just that they’re a clique—as a matter of fact, they’re at least four
cliques all blackguarding each other half the time—but they’re got an entirely
different outlook on life; everything they think important is different from
other people.They try and hide it as much as they can, but it comes out
all the time. …”(Brideshead Revisited, ch. 4)

And then, of course, there is the
famous line of Joyce’s from Finnegan’s
Wake, “Catholic means ‘Here comes everybody.’”

I could go on—Flannery O’Connor
would no doubt have things to say on this subject, and even C.S. Lewis, Anglican
though he was, could provide extensive remarks about the advisability (or otherwise)
of worrying about the respectability of one’s religion—but you catch my
drift.No, I’m afraid Catholics and the
Catholic Church are not respectable, and we never shall be.It’s not that we’re exactly proud of this
fact (well, perhaps some of us—nature’s hippies, to borrow a turn from Mantel—are proud of our unrespectability)—it’s
just that there are other things are of deeper concern to most of us: truth in
the first place, and ultimately happiness.

Chocolate, you know,
has only recently become respectable (and who knows how long it will preserve
its position in this regard), but it has always made people happy.I leave it to the reader to determine whether
its respectability or its deliciousness is the more salient concern.